What does it take to enter into the circumstance? Dan Lo ´pez de Sa Published online: 6 February 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 In the recent literature on contextualism and relativism, one often finds disputes as to which kind of consideration would be relevant for positing a feature of a context as a parameter in the ‘‘circumstance of evaluation.’’ Some, such as Jason Stanley, insist that this can only be via the presence of an operator in the language which shifts that feature: [T]he difference between elements of the circumstance of evaluation and elements of the context of use is precisely that it is elements of the former that are shiftable by sentence operators. So the position that judges are elements of circumstances of evaluation but cannot be shifted by any sentence operators in the language is an untenable position in the philosophy of language (Stanley 2005, p. 150). Others, such as John MacFarlane, consider this to be an unmotivated restriction, and argue that one alternative way to enter into the ‘‘circumstance’’ is by being a feature of a context with respect to which the truth of ‘‘propositions’’ expressed in the context is relative: Certainly we should not posit a parameter of circumstances of evaluation without a good reason, but why suppose that the only thing that could be such a reason is an operator that shifts the parameter? To see how unreasonable [the restriction] is, consider what it would recommend if we were doing semantics for a language devoid of modal operators or counterfactual conditionals. Since D. Lo ´pez de Sa (&) ICREA at Departament de Lo `gica, Histo `ria i Filosofia de la Cie `ncia & LOGOS Universitat de Barcelona, Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain e-mail: dlopezdesa@ub.edu 123 Philos Stud (2012) 159:147–153 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9695-4